College Football: UW sports will bear Emmert's mark

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, March 25, 2004

Mark Emmert, back left, stayed near LSU football and coach Nick Saban, giving a jersey to Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Mark Emmert, back left, stayed near LSU football and coach Nick Saban, giving a jersey to Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Photo: / Associated Press

College Football: UW sports will bear Emmert's mark

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After another LSU football victory, the buzzing reporters wanted an injury report, and Mark Emmert was willing to oblige.

While such information is commonly supplied after games, it's a bit unusual for a tweedy university chancellor -- instead of the football coach -- to offer it. It certainly never happened during a postgame media gathering at Washington.

Emmert, the UW's new president, is a hands-on guy, and athletics clearly are no exception, even if his doctorate is in political science.

While Emmert isn't a fan of face-lifts, like Jones, all major athletic department decisions will end up on his desk. Expect the great divide between Washington's upper campus and athletics to disappear.

Search committee for a new athletic director? Right. Emmert will make the call. Mediocrity in football? Emmert won't be patient. Restructuring an embattled athletic program facing potential NCAA sanctions? Emmert will have the final say.

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Emmert, 51, will throw money at a problem if he believes it serves the university's long-term interests -- and he'll find creative ways to find the cash.

He certainly isn't afraid of risks, nor is he afraid of taking heat from the good-old-boy booster network.

When LSU hired the Tacoma native and Washington graduate in the spring of 1999, the LSU football program was in shambles under Gerry DiNardo. The team was underachieving; there were numerous off-field incidents; players were quitting.

After the Tigers went 3-8 that season, Emmert sidestepped then-athletic director Joe Dean and kicked DiNardo to the curb. Emmert then formed a search committee -- himself -- to lure Saban away from Michigan State.

How did he do that? He gave Saban a $500,000 raise to approximately $1.2 million a year, a salary double what DiNardo was making.

Dean, who had hired DiNardo and his bumbling predecessor, Curly Hallman, opted to retire -- surprise! -- a few months later.

Saban's hire as well as his price tag inspired controversy, but things were just getting started. With the well-liked Dean gone, Emmert again appointed a search committee -- himself -- to find a new AD.

The old-school folks didn't like that. They had their guy: Doug Moreau, a former LSU All-American, a Baton Rouge district attorney and current color analyst for Tigers football games.

Emmert, however, wanted Mitch Barnhart, Oregon State's athletic director. Neither side initially won this showdown. Then both did.

Barnhart didn't like the scuttlebutt he was hearing. The board of supervisors was split on his candidacy. He opted to pass, and a year later was hired at Kentucky.

Emmert's critics tried to paint the situation as an embarrassing fiasco and implied the chancellor was out of his element -- a Yankee who probably didn't even like spicy food.

So Emmert hired the most popular guy in Baton Rouge: LSU baseball coach Skip Bertman, who was fresh off his fifth national title in 2000 and was planning to retire in 2001.

That made griping tough, even when Bertman significantly raised football ticket prices, despite concerns that filling up recently expanded Tiger Stadium -- by 11,000 seats to more than 91,000 -- would be a challenge.

It wasn't. Tiger Stadium was one of just seven 90,000-plus-seat stadiums that averaged 99 percent capacity over the past two seasons, ranking sixth in attendance last year.

Then there's that national title, the school's first football championship since 1958.

The only things dampening the ensuing euphoria -- other than USC winning the No. 1 vote from everyone other than the BCS -- were rampant rumors Saban was headed to the NFL.

Emmert again stepped up. He made Saban the nation's highest-paid college coach, giving him a seven-year contract that starts at $2.3 million and reaches $3 million by the final year.

Of course, if these are the highlights of Emmert's résumé, those who continue to think universities might want to consider the academic side of campus every once and a while likely are quaking in their penny loafers.

Sports make headlines, but Emmert also has bolstered LSU's academic reputation, particularly in areas of research and technology -- see a supercomputer partnership with Cisco Systems and $66 million in federal grants for biomedical research.

Admissions standards are tougher and test scores are up at LSU. Emmert lured a number of prestigious scholars to the bayou. U.S. News ranked the school in a tie for 46th nationally among the nation's top colleges and universities this year.

Emmert also is accustomed to leading a school that is cash-strapped and receives little public money. Fund raising, insiders say, is his forte.

Still, the UW is throwing a lot of money around, and little appears headed to the pockets of professors.

Emmert will receive a raise from the $590,000 he earned at LSU, a number already $250,000 more than current UW president, Lee Huntsman.

Former athletic director Barbara Hedges made $255,000. Count on the next AD making substantially more.

Interim AD Dick Thompson has said the UW plans to pay its next compliance director a six-figure salary, essentially double what Dana Richardson made before she bolted that post.

If the football team falters next year, Emmert might want his own coach. Firing Keith Gilbertson after the 2004 season would cost $735,000, and a likely replacement surely would be paid more than $1 million a year, at least $250,000 more than Gilbertson's annual take.

And it could get substantially more expensive if the school loses its lawsuit vs. former football coach Rick Neuheisel.

But Emmert is a prototype of the new academic CEO. He believes you've got to spend money to make money, and that successful sports programs support the educational mission.

At least, that's the theory.

What's also clear is Emmert, despite his local roots, isn't enamored with the "Seattle Way," an emphasis on consensus building that distinguished the Hedges era and is now blamed for many of the UW's woes.

His leadership will be out front and decisive. The new AD will do his bidding, so upper campus no longer will be able to react with shock if the excrement again seeks out the propeller.

That means Emmert will shoulder the lion's share of the credit -- or blame -- for the UW athletic department's direction over the next decade.